“Cissy is running back with a butterfly.” (Our hands unlock.) “Don’t you see the difficulties of my position? Don’t you know that ladies are often jealous of governesses; and that unless—unless they imagined I was—I was favourable to Mr. Drencher, who is very good and kind—the ladies at Shrublands might not like my remaining alone in the house with—with—you understand?” A moment the eyes look over the spectacles: at the next, the meek bonnet bows down towards the ground. I wonder did she hear the bump—bumping of my heart? O heart!—O wounded heart! did I ever think thou wouldst bump—bump again? “Egl—Egl—izabeth,” I say, choking with emotion, “do, do, do you—te—tell me—you don’t—don’t—don’t—lo—love that apothecary?” She shrugs her shoulder—her charming shoulder. “And if,” I hotly continue, “if a gentleman—if a man of mature age certainly, but who has a kind heart and four hundred a-year of his own—were to say to you, ‘Elizabeth! will you bid the flowers of a blighted life to bloom again?—Elizabeth! will you soothe a wounded heart?’”—— “Oh, Mr. Batchelor!” she sighed, and then added quickly, “Please, don’t take my hand. Here’s Pop.” And that dear child (bless him!) came up at the moment, saying, “Oh, Miss Prior! look here! I’ve got such a jolly big toadstool!” And next came Cissy, with a confounded butterfly. O Richard the Third! Haven’t you been maligned because you smothered two little nuisances in a Tower? What is to prove to me that you did not serve the little brutes right, and that you weren’t a most humane man? Darling Cissy coming up, then, in her dear, charming way, says, “You shan’t take Mr. Batchelor’s hand, you shall take _my_ hand!” And she tosses up her little head, and walks with the instructress of her youth. “_Ces enfans ne comprennent guère le Français_,” says Miss Prior, speaking very rapidly. “_Après lonche?_” I whisper. The fact is, I was so agitated, I hardly knew what the French for lunch was. And then our conversation dropped: and the beating of my own heart was all the sound I heard. Lunch came. I couldn’t eat a bit: I should have choked. Bessy ate plenty, and drank a glass of beer. It was her dinner, to be sure. Young _Blacksheep_ did not appear. We did not miss him. When Lady Baker began to tell her story of George IV. at Slane Castle, I went into my own room. I took a book. Books? Paha! I went into the garden. I took out a cigar. But no, I would not smoke it. Perhaps she——many people don’t like smoking.